writes:

So if we put you in a real aircraft, you've been trained to
compensate for a time lag on all your reactions. That is a Bad thing.

I don't anticipate that it would be a problem. There's more variation from
one specific aircraft to another, even of the same model, than there is in
what you describe. It would be interesting to see how many real-world pilots
could touch down consistently with 5-foot accuracy.

Next up, lets talk about your feel for the controls.

See above.

What you are essentially saying is that driving one car doesn't allow you to
drive any others, because they all have a different control feel and different
timing. Obviously, in the real world, that isn't the case. Small differences
are easy to compensate for.

It is true that if you are a skilled aerobatic pilot, and you move abruptly
from one specific aircraft to another and then attempt maneuvers that require
extremely precise control, you might have a problem. But normal flying
doesn't require that--which is a good thing, because otherwise you'd be
risking your life just changing from one Cessna 152 to another.

... that means you need to move your stick 7 degrees before the
software even notices it.

Not my joystick.

Oh and it gets worse. To smooth things out, you'll
find that in slow flight MS and other simulators condition you to
jerk the controls quite a bit to get motion started in the above
mentioned landing mode.

I don't have to jerk the controls to get motion started. Are we really
talking about the same sim?

Its control law smoothing, and its done to
make you feel comfortable as you approach the ground, otherwise with
that 200 mS lag, you'd come darn close grinding a wing tip into the
ground from the roll error every time. The real aircraft, other then
control system friction and cable stretching, has unlimited
resolution, and the flight response shows it.

In other words, the real aircraft is a lot easier to fly. So if I can fly
successfully in a sim with all its limitations, I can certainly do it in real
life, where those limitations don't exist. If I can fly and compensate for
delays and smoothing and what-not in a sim, I can certainly fly when no
compensation is needed.

Perhaps that helps explain why so many pilots who can fly competently in real
life cannot successfully land in the sim.

MS does a lot of fudging to make your flight smooth and landings easy.
The real thing doesn't. Heck, with those errors how do you think
people can catch the wire in carrier landings on consumer sim
software, time after time? The answer is the flight model code is
doing it for you. Especially when landing.

In the past, the carrier was massively oversized; I don't know if that is
still the case, as I don't attempt to land on carriers.

Still think you'd make it if we stuck you a in a real plane alone?

Yes.

Odds are you'd lead or lag in time so much on the landing you'd
break the gear or cartwheel. Your conditioned to do it by the code and
the system timing and control resolution.

The conditioning is not strong and is easy to overcome. Human beings are very
flexible.

I'm curious, is your sim set up so one PC runs the flight model and
controls and the other does the visuals? Or do you just have one
machine and one graphics card?

The latter.

In one very popular sim, the rotorcraft model is a cessna 172 body
with a rotor added and the wing removed, and the tail rotor and main
rotors are defined as a thrusters. Because their is no rotor disk in
the form of a wing , Ground effect does not show up on approach.

I don't fly rotary-wing aircraft as a general rule, but I've heard that MSFS
does a respectable job.

Your basic sim software is very unlike the real thing.

So is yours. But it still does the job.

You underestimate the ability of people to compensate for the differences you
describe. And the differences you describe are in some cases smaller than the
real-world random differences with which a pilot would have to cope.